A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
Boring munchkin technique #1: What if I told you there was a place you could go where they would give you books? paper or ebook, whichever you prefer. And if they didn't have the book you wanted, they would order it for you? And when you were done with the book. and didn't want it cluttering up your apartment any more, you could give it back to them; and they would store it for you until needed it again? So not only does this service get you books. It effectively increases the amount of living space you have, and the general neatness of your apartment or house. How much would you pay for such a service? $50 a month? $100 a month? $5000 a year? How much do you spend on books now that you have to store and manage?
Of course, you already know there is such a service, and it doesn't cost you even $10 a month. It's the public library. If you haven't stopped into your public library lately, it's time to check it out again. Public libraries have become a lot more effective in the last decade. You can now order books online, and have them delivered to your local branch, so if you remember a time when the library rarely had what you wanted, check again. It's no longer just a place to browse to find something to read. It's a place where you can find exactly the book you want. If library fines bother you, libraries will now send you email reminders to renew, and let you renew online. If you use ebooks, you don't even have to go to the library to pick up or return the books. Most libraries are much more convenient than they were even a few years ago.
It's not perfect. Most libraries don't have a lot of the more technical books, ebooks aren't as available as they should be (blame the publishers for that since they don't license a lot of ebooks to libraries) and occasionally you may have to bring a paper book back to the library before you're done with it because someone else wants to read it. However if your reading tastes aren't too esoteric, and you have access to a good library system in a major metropolitan area, then you can get 90% or more of your books from the public library. You will still buy a few books that they don't have available, or that you really want to consult every day for a year; but you can save a lot of money, time, and space by visiting your local library before you visit amazon.
Or you could get it even more conveniently, even faster, and even cheaper from the internet. Even if you for some reason hesitate to pirate, it's easy to find a legally free alternative to anything.